Finally, 2020, year of Nigeria’s ‘Visions,’ is here: Has the nation attained the goal of being among 20 great economies?

ON November 27, 1996, the late Head of State, General Sani Abacha’s regime came up with a development project tagged Vision 2010. It was a projected vision to provide an economic road map for Nigeria in which it would depend less on oil, close up its ethnic and social divisions and improve on its agriculture, education, health and other areas of national endeavour.

In pursuing the vision, a 248-member committee including 25 foreign stakeholders resident in Nigeria came into being, including sub-committees that would work across board on key national issues. The mandate of the committee, among others, included developing a blueprint that would transform the country into a prosperous and advanced nation which Nigerians themselves had always desired as worthy of being called their own by 2010.

The committee worked for 10 months, held 12 workshops, including 57 external workshops and considered more than 750 memoranda, presentations, among others.

Areas such as politics, economy, education, health, urbanisation, unemployment, infrastructure, women’s rights and corruption, among others, were considered as priority which, if well addressed, would take the country to greater heights and put it at par with other advancing nations.

However, the lofty idea, like many others instituted in the country, became a mirage. At that time, 2010 must have seemed like light years away, and given the propensity by administrations in the country for ‘fire-brigade approach’ by the time the country finally entered into that year, the objectives were far from being achieved.

In fact, even 10 years after, Nigeria had become the poverty capital of the world, having the highest number of out-of-school children in the world. There was socioeconomic inequality, poor infrastructure and electricity supply, high rate of unemployment and illiteracy, while still relying heavily on crude oil revenue as its main source of earning.

While the world had moved away from Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals, Nigeria was still stuck with achieving the basic goals of the Vision 2010 and grappling with how to start the journey on the path of SDG, long-achieved by other countries.

 

New vision

By 2005, it was clear that the Vision 2010 project was a failure.  Thus, another idea mooted by the President Olusegun Obasanjo administration came into being tagged Vision 20:2020. Not minding the fact that the earlier project had failed, Nigeria again embarked on the ambitious project of placing Nigeria among the top 20 economies of the world by 2020. Though given the necessary hype, not many Nigerians gave the new vision a chance of possible success. In achieving the goals of the Vision 20: 2020, the idea was to link the objectives of the National Economic and Empowerment Development Strategy (NEEDS) programme, NEEDS 2 programme and the Seven–point Agenda. In addition, the National Planning Commission and the Vision 2020 secretariat were mandated by the then Federal Executive Council to produce the Vision 2020 plan.

The main organs expected to work out the project include the National Council on Vision 2020, the National Steering Committee, the National Technical Working Group, the Stakeholders Development Committee and the Economic Management Team which was to serve as the think-tank of the vision while the president was to be the chairman of the apex organ of the entire project.

There were three stages in the development process of the project. One was building a solid foundation which was supposed to be achieved between 2008 and 2010. The second stage was achieving the Millennium Development Goals en route Vision 2020 and was to run between 2011 and 2015, while the final stage which was the icing on the cake was bringing Nigeria into the top 20 economy group by 2020 and was to be achieved between 2015 and 2020.

 

Dead on arrival

Some experts spoken to by Sunday Tribune were quick to point out that the project was dead on arrival. One of the reasons, they said, was that the policy was never supported by any deliberate government policy framework which would have ensured that successive governments keyed into it and work towards its realisation.

A prominent economist and former Managing Director, Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON), Mr. Mustafa Chike-Obi, told Sunday Tribune that one of the reasons the Vision 2020 failed was lack of coherence in and coordination among various agencies of government. He added that for quite some time, Nigerian leaders have not been able to appoint a chief economic adviser trusted by them, the nation and having the confidence of the international community.

According to him, past and present administrations in the country have not taken the economy as a priority, stressing that if it was the priority of any Nigerian leader, he (the leader) must hire a chief economic adviser who would coordinate his vision for the economy.

Chike-Obi said: “I always say, unfortunately, a modern economy is very complicated. It is not something for amateurs to dabble into. What you do in one place affects another place. So, we need to sit down to figure out what are our economic objectives, and that comes from the president.

“The president should say what his vision of the economy is and then hire people to help him achieve that ambition. We have not had any articulated and coherent economic vision from the president. I hear things like: ‘I want foreign exchange stability.’ That is not an economic vision. Foreign exchange stability is just a tool for an economic vision. I have not heard any single coherent economic vision coming out of this government.

“And I think that is a problem because once you have a vision, then it is easy. You get people who buy into that vision and those who are competent to accomplish that vision, then it will not be difficult to execute. But once you don’t have a vision, people would do their own thing. CBN may do things that make sense to CBN; Ministry of Budget and Planning may do things that make sense to them while Trade and Investment will do anything that makes sense to them. But some of those things that make sense individually may not fit into a coherent plan.”

Speaking further, he stated: “So, a tight fiscal policy would clash with a loose monetary policy and also a tight monetary policy may clash with a loose fiscal policy. All those things can be assembled and the only person who can assemble them is the president. But the president, I’m tired of saying this, does not have a chief economic adviser. How can an economy be such a priority and he does not have a chief economic adviser who coordinates your vision?”

Speaking to Sunday Tribune, a chartered accountant, Mr. Yemi Olusoga, stated that “In 2007, when the idea of becoming one of the top 20 most advanced economies in the world was conceived by the Obasanjo’s administration, the idea was considered to be very ambitious but it was believed that Nigeria can make efficient use of its human and natural resources to achieve a rapid economic growth and translate its economic development into equitable social development for all citizens.

“The strategies adopted to achieve the objectives included addressing the major constraints to Nigeria’s growth and competitiveness, such as epileptic power supply, weak infrastructure and institutions.

“It was also intended that the nation would aggressively pursue a structural transformation of the economy from a mono-product to a diversified and industrialised economy, to invest in human capital to transform the Nigerian people into active agents for growth and national development and to invest in infrastructure to create an enabling environment for growth, industrial competitiveness and sustainable development.”

He also said: “While the Nigerian economy grew by 7.8 per cent in 2010, economic growth slowed down and contracted by 1.5 per cent in 2016. In a similar vein, the country had not been able to achieve significant improvements in terms of records of social development. Nigeria’s progress on the Human Development Index (HDI) is also not encouraging.

“The government did not appear to take any concrete action towards the Vision 20:2020 goals. For example, the country allocated 6.54 per cent of its total annual expenditure to the educational sector in the 2009 budget. By 2010, when the vision’s implementation was intended to have commenced, the sector’s allocation had declined to 5.4 per cent.”

Olusoga said though there were signs that the dream was falling short of actualisation as a result in shortfall in budgetary allocation to critical sectors such as education, agriculture and health, however, the change in administration in 2015 put the final nail in the coffin of the vision.

 

Lack of commitment

Professor Remi Aiyede, a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Ibadan, was no less critical of the levity with which the nation’s past leader had handled the nation’s economic matters. As far as he was concerned, the entire Vision 2020 had failed due to inertia by Nigerian leaders.

“We are very far from achieving the vision because the arrowhead of the goals of the vision 2020 was that Nigeria will become the 20th largest economy in the world by 2020 which is why they moved from Vision 2010 to Vision 20:20:20. Besides, an elaborate programme of activities was put in place to orchestrate the realisation of the vision, but none of the line of actions was carried out by the successive government after the administration of Goodluck Jonathan,” Aiyede added.

The political scientist noted that the strategic plan of actions consists of governance reforms dimension, the social dimension and the economic dimension which plan to diversify the economy in such a way that the private sector becomes so large that it will become the engine room for the development of the country.

Prof. Aiyede stressed that despite the strategies designed in the Vision 20:20:20 for an all-round diversification of the Nigerian economy with private sector economic domination, the economy under President Muhammadu Buhari’s watch is still largely driven by revenue generated through petroleum even though agriculture accounts for the largest part of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the economy.

According to him, Vision 20:20:20 has three distinct phases. The first phase, he said, “is to transform the capacity of workers in the public sector and reorganise the administrative machinery in such a way that the public sector becomes very meaningful, having few agencies working very effectively.

“The second phase was to introduce technology to strengthen targeting and accountability for results such that there will be some measure of decentralisation where each unit will be able to set its own programmes and give accounts systematically with quarterly and half year reports that will reveal what it agency set out to achieve at the beginning of the year and how far it has gone. And the last phase was supposed to be a phase where Nigerian public administration will be world class in terms of information technology, e-administration, e-governance, and e-citizenship.

“Ordinarily, we are supposed to underline the importance of government business; but, firstly the infrastructure on which to build the electronic policies hasn’t been available. In fact, we have not even been able to generate more than 10% of the volume of electricity that we need in Nigeria today. That’s why as 2020 came closer, the commitment to the vision document waned accordingly because when the Jonathan administration left, nobody mentioned Vision 2020 again as it was clear to them (the APC) that they were not likely to be close to the mark, let alone achieving it.

Speaking further he said: “Even the three programmes the APC came up with in place of the Vision 202020, that is, the anti-corruption, diversification of the economy and security programmes had fared below expectation. Now, if you bring the Vision 2020 document and you look at their achievements in terms of these three areas, you will discover a huge gap between what the Vision 2020 set out to achieve and what they have achieved. And that is why nobody refers to that document again.

“But when you put the vision aside, you don’t really have anything to hold the government accountable for because that document turned out to be a document of accountability because it not only contained set goals or target, it provided indicators on where we are supposed to be every time till 2020.”

When asked whether there was any economic measures of the Federal Government taken in 2019 towards the actualisation of the Vision 2020, Professor Aiyede responded: ‘They are not there. In fact, they are no longer talking about it. If anything at all, we have got to a point where visioning has been relegated to the background.

“If we have been faithful to that vision, we won’t be talking about high rate of unemployment or high rate of crime arising from joblessness. We have in reality moved backward instead of moving forward. So I think this government needs to go back and reflect on those visions because visions are very important as they create a non-partisan context in which people can measure the performance of government. We have not been faithful to the actualisation of the vision because we lack the discipline required to bring it to fruition.